What is it about?
Analysis of cancer family history (CFH) offers a low-cost genetic tool to identify familial cancer predisposition. In middle-income settings, the scarcity of individual records and database-linked records hinders the assessment of self-reported CFH consistency as an indicator of familial cancer predisposition. We used self-reported CFH to identify those families at risk for hereditary cancer syndromes in community-based primary care centers of a low-income Brazilian area. We also evaluated the consistency of the information collected by reassessing CFH five years later.
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Why is it important?
We interviewed 390 families and constructed their pedigrees for genetic cancer risk assessment. We found 125 families affected by cancer, 35.2% with moderate to high risk of familial susceptibility to cancer, a number that represents a relatively high prevalence of potential hereditary cancer syndromes in the overall study sample. Upon reassessment of CFH in 14/20 families that were previously identified as having at least one first-degree and one second-degree relative affected by cancer, and presented moderate to high risk for developing cancer, 90% of initial pedigrees were confirmed.
Perspectives
These results demonstrate the reliability of self-reports as a means of early identification of healthy individuals at risk, encouraging the wider use of this method in low- and middle-income primary care settings.
Dr Luís Carlos Lopes-Júnior
Federal University of São Carlos - UFSCar
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Self-reported cancer family history is a useful tool for identification of individuals at risk of hereditary cancer predisposition syndrome at primary care centers in middle-income settings: a longitudinal study, Genetics and Molecular Biology, June 2016, FapUNIFESP (SciELO),
DOI: 10.1590/1678-4685-gmb-2014-0362.
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